The long journey to find one's inner dog.

I really want to like my family. I love them I do. But I don’t like them. I want. I just can’t. I don’t think I ever will. If the truth was known I probably don’t like any of them. Not my mom. Not my Aunt Doo. Not by brother. Not any of them.

The reason:

Well here’s a perfectly good example. With the onset of the controversy over the Confederate Flag my Aunt Debbie has taken to posting things like this:

She prefaces all of this with “this isn’t racist, it’s just a southern thing.”

And I’m supposed to believe it. This is a woman who was fired from her job of ten years for making racist comments against a co-worker. This is a woman who would rather be poor than vote for Obama. (She is poor. She supports her grand kids through welfare and public assistance.) I’ve said for years that my family would rather me come home with a white boy than a black girl. And I’m supposed to believe it’s not meant exactly as it appears.

And it frustrates me. Because I call her on it. I tell her it’s racist. I tell it’s bullshit. She never owns it. So this is what I wrote tonight in response to the above meme:

Because you are a racist. I’ll tell you the same thing I tell Ronnie. I don’t care if you are racist. But stop the bullshitting and just admit it. I’d respect you so much more if you did. Instead you hide behind this “it’s a southern thing” which is white speak for racist. EVERYONE knows it. You know it. I know it. So stop pretending and just admit it.

I no longer care if I piss her off. I no longer care what she thinks. This idea that you can post racist bullshit and pretend it’s “heritage” has to stop. It is what it is. Just admit it.

Adam likes it when I blog. Which surprises me a little bit. I’d think he wouldn’t like our laundry aired. So I really, really, really am going to try and start being more frequent with my posts.

I’m sitting in my office, which is one of our three bedrooms. He’s in the kitchen making a cake. It’s very peaceful back here. I can hear the TV, I can hear him working, occasionally he’ll ask me a question or say something. It’s very nice. I like our house. I like our life. I like Adam!

So tonight I took photos of our house for my mom so I thought I’d share them. Here you go.

This is the front of our house in the summer. The hydrangea has just started blooming.

Another shot down by the garage. Our lawn is landscaped within and inch of it’s life.

We have a LOT. LET ME REPEAT A LOT of day lilies. The previous owner was a horticulturist and bred them and cultivated them. You can’t see it in the photo but there are labels like in a botanical garden that shows their name. They are all named after Democratic politicians. There are a lot in the back yard as well.

This is the back yard. We have double patio doors that we want to replace with french doors. Where the window is all the way to the right we’d also like to add a french door. It’s the Master Bedroom. The area with the weird ground cover like space is where a dog run used to be. We took out the fence and are letting the grass grow back.

This is the piano room. It’s off to the right through the window.

Look! More day lilies.

This is our new kitchen with it’s new subway tile backsplash. It will be completely done in another couple of weeks.

It’s so great that my office doesn’t smell like pee. I actually have enjoyed being in here for the past hour.

So.

I don’t consider myself patient. Adam will tell you differently but I think the only person in the world I’m actually patient with is him.

So.

Tonight.

I didn’t leave work tonight till almost 8:45. It was a long day that started by my oversleeping and getting to work late. I spent the day putting out fires in the hotel I manage and I mean ugly situations. We fucked up four different times today with people’s reservations. We had to move people around, and one couple was actually bumped out of our hotel and put in a hotel across the street from us. Whoops. It all ended with everyone happy but it was a stressful afternoon.

I then had an hour long meeting with a person (and her assistant) that is forcing us to do a party for 25 of her friends. And I mean forcing, I told her no the first two times she called, so she called our less than nice owner and he called and told me I was doing it. It’s on a Friday in July and it’s going to be a royal pain in my ass but we are certainly doing it. The chef/owner who was present at the meeting today for the first time ever I saw him visibly agitated with a guest. This woman was smug and entitled and full of it, asking for the world. He finally just said no which he NEVER does. I was proud of him.

Then to top it off the restaurant was slammed tonight. The numbers we did tonight, a Thursday we were doing on Saturdays last August. It was crazy. Needless to say I barely got any of the work I needed to get done today before I left.

So.

I’m starving. I work at a restaurant but I forgot to order food today and it was too busy to get something before I left. So I decide to stop at Chipotle. I pull into the drive and the place is a mob scene. The line is out the door. I don’t have the energy to wait in line so I decide to drive to the other one in town. It’s out of the way but better than standing in line.

I get there and there are four people in line. Two boys, each hotter than the next. And a woman with her daughter. I’m standing there gazing at the boys and BAM some kid pushes me out of the way and the next thing I know the woman is joined by her two sons. AND THEN. She’s joined by her husband and another kid. So what was four people in front of me is now 8.

FUCK THAT SHIT. I bite my tongue. It’s not that they were in front of me, it’s the way they went about it and the entitled bullshit aura they were giving off. I continue to bite my tongue. And then it became apparent that they had never been to a Chipotle before. They asked stupid questions, they couldn’t make up their minds. It ended up taking about fifteen minutes to get their food prepared.

Well actually it took a little longer.

BECAUSE.

When the father of the group got to the counter the kid making burritos decided that would be a good time to make the burritos for the call in order they had. So it was actually close to 20 minutes before they made their way to the table and I got to make my burrito.

I’ve been missing in action lately but I’m hoping to be better. Part of the problem has been that my office, where my computer is smelled like cat pee to no end. Seriously. It was disgusting.

Until today!

We finally discovered the source of the smell.

And how did we discover this?

Well, I’m glad you asked.

Adam had been told by several friends to get Nature’s Miracle. Supposedly it works wonders and is great at getting rid of the odor of pet urine. We bought some on Monday. Today we make plans to move the furniture in the guest room and do the floors in the hopes that it would work.

I went in to prep the room and what did I disover? Cat poop in the middle of the unmade guest bed. YUCK! So I investigated. Turns out the mattress was soaded in cat pee. Disgusting. You’d think we’d have noticed it was wet but we did not. We immediately moved the mattress to the garage and then I had a friend come help me take it to the recycling center. And we covered the box spring in plastic.

And just like that the smell of cat pee in our house is gone.

Now.

We have to figure out how to keep them from doing it again.

We are kind of glad that’s all it is. We were prepping ourselves to spend thousands of dollars to have the floors redone. Now we just have to buy a mattress. We are actually going to replace ours and put ours in the guest room. The big question now is whether to stay with a queen or upgrade to a king?

Hopefully with the smell gone I won’t mind being in my office and will be more anxious to blog again.

When we bought the house the woman who lived here before us was a pig. A hoarder. And the house was disgusting.

It took us a week to get her stuff in a pile in the garage. The previous owner paid to have the house professionally cleaned, the floors buffed and re-polyurethaned because the whole house smelled like cat pee. The woman who lived here had three dogs (at one time seven) and one cat and let them pee and poop anywhere they wanted. The first few days we were here it was disgusting the smell was so bad.

After the cleaning all was better. The smell seemed to have gone away, their cleaning person and our cleaning person made the place sparkle.

Life was good.

Until about two days ago.

The smell of cat pee has returned. And it’s old cat pee, not new cat pee so we are pretty sure it’s not our cats. And it’s intense. So now we are worried that we are going to be the proud owner of a house that smells like cat pee.

Adam said today that he’d done research and had a plan. I hope its true because the back of the house where the bedrooms are reeks. I have all the windows open and it still smells badly.

The house is getting there. We still have a very, very, very long way to go. And I have to admit it’s getting a little frustrating that it’s taken so long. We aren’t even doing massive, huge remodeling projects and I’m already over it. I read and see stories of people living with the mess and chaos for months and years and I have to wonder how the hell they do it. Seriously.

The kitchen is still a work in progress. We have appliances, which was a headache in and of itself. We bought them from Sears. We bought the least expensive we could get and it was still almost 4,000. If we’d bought what we really wanted it would have been upwards of 7,500. When Sears delivered them the delivery guys brought them in and dumped them in the middle of our kitchen. They didn’t install them, level them or anything. They told Adam we didn’t have the right connector to hook up the fridge to the water supply. (Turns out it took us about three minutes to do it ourselves, but why the hell do they promise to do it if they aren’t going to do it.) They didn’t level the stove and when it came time to finally use it, turns out the legs that level it were missing. We called the store and it took 10 days to get new ones. We ordered a microwave from them and was told it would be available for pick up at the store in about three days. Two weeks later it still hadn’t arrived. Adam called and was told there was a problem and to cancel the order and start over. So he cancelled the order and bought a new microwave at Best Buy. Only that was almost a month ago and we are still waiting for him to get refunded the money. He’s called three or four times and each times he’s been told that it will be reversed in three to five days. On Monday he called the bank and reported the charge as false and ask to get it refunded back to his account. We are still waiting. If anyone in the Sears company is following Google alerts and sees when Sears, Sears, Sears, Sears is mentioned online I have to say that if we had it to do over again we’d pay more and get our appliances elsewhere. Your customer service, follow through and quality lack tremendously.

Now lets talk about the cabinets. We bought cabinets from Ikea. Ikea is in Boston about two hours away. We drove down in March and purchased them while they were doing a spend so much get 20% off sale. We spent that much by a long shot. We paid 250 dollars to have the cabinets delivered in April. (They only deliver to our area twice a month). The only catch. They were missing about 15 things we needed to actually complete our purchase. We were told we’d have to make additional trips to purchase said things. After four trips and countless online purchases we finally got the last of our items last week. It’s June. I can’t complain though, my friend DeeDee bought her cabinets during the sale however they actually don’t have two of the cabinets she needs, so she hasn’t even started her renovation and that was two months ago. So April 21 comes and they deliver our cabinets. Yay. About 50 flat packed packages. So we start putting them together. And the day is fast approaching when we are going to have a handy man come and install them for us. And Adam makes a discovery. 1,500 dollars worth of product had been left off the delivery. A vent hood and an tall upright cabinet. Unfortunately, we can’t do the install without either. So we hop in the car and have to drive 2 hours to get the cabinet and vent. Why did we pay 250 dollars again? THEN. Adam is continuing to put cabinets together and what do you know one of the cabinets is white when our cabinets are supposed to be brown! FUCK. FUCK. FUCK! I leave work early and drive two hours to Boston to trade my white cabinet for a brown cabinet. While I’m there I find the store manager and demand that they refund us our delivery charge. He does so, but he’s not happy about it. We also bought our countertops from Ikea because with the 20% discount it was cheaper than buying them in Maine. So by this time we have the cabinets installed and the appointment is made to make the template for the the counter tops. So they come and do it and tell Adam that we are exactly 54 dollars short on our charge because it’s going to take one square foot more than we paid for. SO. He’s told to call Ikea and pay for the additional square foot. Once it’s paid for they’ll cut the counters and bring them to us. Have you ever called Ikea? I suspect calling the White House and speaking to Barack Obama would be easier than calling Ikea and actually speaking to a real live human being. He called for more than a week. A fucking week. A WHOLE FUCKING WEEK. And no one ever called him back. So. We got back in our car and drove to Boston and literally about three miles before we got to the store the lady called. He paid the amount and we were done. Finally we could get counter tops. So if anyone from Ikea gets Google alerts when Ikea, Ikea, Ikea, Ikea, Ikea is mentioned online, I’m pretty sure if we had it to do over again we’d have paid more for a better solution to our cabinet needs. And we’ll definitely NEVER suggest them to anyone.

So.

The counter tops are delivered. And the two guys get them installed. And Adam realizes that they haven’t been cut correctly. The corners are rounded instead of square. So he has them take out the part with corners and tells them they’ll have to fix them. They aren’t happy but they leave. Then we start looking at the counter tops they left behind and they aren’t much better. They over hang on the front of the cabinets is almost 1.5 inches in some places. It’s not consistent at all and looks bad. Adam feels bad but I tell him that in no way am I going to have paid thousands of dollars for counter tops that look like shit. I also assure him that it’s not the first time they’ve made this mistake and won’t be the last. He calls and talks to Letecia and tells her that he wants ALL the counters recut. She’s not happy but says okay. They come back to our house from Boston and remove the remaining counter tops and then RETEMPLATE the whole thing again. The new counters arrived last Wednesday. They are better but far from perfect. It’s like they let the “B” team cut them and install them. We are going to live with them.

Let’s talk about the electrician. He’s a friend of my bosses. He comes highly recommended. We had him come by at the end of April to talk about what we wanted done. We are having additional outlets placed in the kitchen. All the recessed lighting replaced with new cans. Install six new recessed lights in the kitchen. Install three outdoor lights. And a few other things. He came to our house a few days before he left to go on vacation. He told us he’d reach out to us when he got back from vacation and schedule a time to come by. He returned from his trip on May 7. It’s taken a month to get him back to our home. Adam finally called and sternly told him that he HAD to come on Friday and install the electric for the stove, dishwasher and garbage disposal. He did. We still don’t know when he’s coming to do the rest.

Let’s talk about the plumber. We need to have all the water run in our kitchen including the sink and dishwasher. We also need our faucet installed. We’ve been told it should take about four or five hours and would cost about 500/600 dollars. We are putting it on a credit card which limits the people that we can use. There is a local company that comes highly recommended but they charge by the job NOT by the hour. When Adam called them they told him it would be around 500 dollars but they wouldn’t be able to tell him a set price until they came to our house. The catch: If we decide not to use them we still have to pay 80 dollars for the estimate. So Adam schedules them and they come bright and early Monday morning. And proceed to tell Adam that it’s going to be 1100 dollars for the work. Double what we’d been told. The problem is, that Adam has a wedding cake due this Saturday and is desperate for water, electric, counter tops, and appliances. He wakes me up to ask me what he should do. I have no idea what to say. We can afford to put it on the credit card but if we can get it cheaper and he can afford to wait we should do that. Finally after what seemed like hours but was probably about three minutes Adam sent him on his way. We now have a new plumber coming tomorrow at noon.

I’ll end with this. We have replaced the brass wall sconces in our bathroom with really nice shaded units. They are quite pretty and Adam is happy that he found them. They add an element of elegance to our bathroom and we like them a lot. On Sunday we installed them. When we installed the last one we opened the box containing the shade and it was empty. This sums up our whole kitchen experience. The shade box was empty. Three sconces. Two shades. The problem is easily fixed by calling the company and having them ship us one. That’s not the point. It’s just that even the easy stuff is a pain in the ass!

That’s all for tonight. I haven’t proofed this so please forgive any glaring mistakes!

One of my employees is in the hospital. She acts as my opening manager for breakfast Monday through Friday. Since she’s not there, I’m now opening for breakfast. Which means instead of getting to work between 9:00 and 10:00 I’m getting there between 6:30 and 7:00. Unfortunately, I’m not good at going to bed in a timely fashion so for instance last night I got to bed at 11:45. I read for about 20 minutes and turned the light off around midnight. The alarm went off the first time at 5:30. You do the math. That’s only 5.5 hours of sleep. Not enough for most people. ESPECIALLY not enough for me. I hit the wall around 5:00 today and have never really recovered. Luckily tomorrow is Saturday and I don’t have to be at work until 2:00. This means that I can sleep late, except that Adam has given me chores to do before I leave for work tomorrow. UGH.

We moved on April 27th. It took all day. We started around 8:00 that morning and finished around 5:00. About five minutes later my boss showed up along with our friends Lisa and Michelle and we popped a bottle of champagne open and toasted our new house. This was followed by dinner at the only restaurant we could find open at 9:30 on a Monday night. We got home and fell into bed around 11:30. I didn’t sleep a wink. I was exhausted beyond belief but the new surroundings, the quiet, the dark was unsettling and I couldn’t fall asleep.

That was almost a month ago and now I sleep like a baby in our new home. The dark. The quiet. The new surroundings. They are all awesome. But I’m still tired. Every day that I’m off is spent working around the house. Painting. Gardening. Installing cabinets. It’s a non stop job. Between that and running errands to facilitate getting more work done on the house it’s continuos. Couple this with a still crazy work schedule and it’s no wonder I fall asleep on the couch every night waiting for Adam to come home. It’s the reason I haven’t been blogging. I haven’t had the energy to get up off the couch and compose two sentences.

So we continue to work on the house. On Monday we’ll have been here four weeks. We still don’t have a kitchen. All of the cabinets have been installed. Adam got a call today saying the countertops will be here on Wednesday. After that we can schedule the plumber to come hook up the sink and dishwasher. And we’ll have the electrician come and run the power for the new stove (there’s no gas in our new neighborhood). With any luck within the next two weeks we’ll have a working kitchen again. It won’t even be closed to finished. But we’ll be able to cook and use it.

Keep your fingers crossed.

I’ll post pictures in the next couple of days so you can see what’s going on.

Here’s a teaser for tonight.

Here’s what our kitchen looked like after the demo. Check out the amazing gingham wall paper and the linoleum floor. The dusty rose paint was quite special as well.

On a positive note. Adam and I paid our first mortgage payment today. Only 359 more to go.

I’m 50 and 7 days. God that’s old. The time is passing so fast. It feels like I never have time to stop and say wait a minute. Hold on.

So. For my birthday.

We had the yard sale.

Then.

I took a truck full of stuff to Goodwill.

Then.

I came home and showered.

Then.

Adam and I drove to the town where my restaurant is so that he could do a cake tasting. I think I’ve mentioned before he does wedding cakes. Last year he did one for a co-worker and the wedding planner loved it. So now she’s hooked him up with several more weddings that are all in and around the town I work in.

So.

We drove to the town and he dropped me off at a hotel that my company owns that we were staying in for the night. I read Facebook and dozed while he was at the tasting. He got back to the room around 3:30 and we both napped for a while.

At 5:00 we got up, got dressed and went to my restaurant. We sat in the bar and had happy hour drinks and appetizers.

Then.

We went to a wine bar on the other side of the little town and met some co-workers of mine. We had more snacks and fun cocktails and had a great time. We laughed a lot. That’s a story in and of itself.

Then.

We drove back to the hotel and had dinner at the fine dining French restaurant that is in the hotel we were staying in. They were running behind on reservations so we actually sat at the bar and had another drink and they sent us out some snack. We were almost full by the time we were actually sat for dinner.

Dinner was amazing. I ordered things outside my comfort zone and enjoyed all of it. Because we were sat so late we were the last table in the restaurant. I felt bad about that but it wasn’t our fault.

We finished dessert and took our wine and after dinner drink up to our room.

We showered and settled in to watch Saturday Night Live. We watched the intro and both promptly passed out. We woke up a couple of hours later and the TV was on but the show was off.

It was great. It was also my 50th. It’s hard to believe that I actually lived to see 50. Not because of anything I did, or do, but because it just seemed impossible that I’d ever be this old. DAMN!

So.

My birthday weekend:

Saturday morning Adam and I got up at the butt crack of dawn to hold a yard sale. We had a fair amount of stuff left over from our last yard sale and we didn’t really want to move any of it. So we got up at 7:00 and started taking things downstairs. When we opened the door there were already two men waiting for the sale to start. We’d advertised that it started at 8:00. I know they are called early birds but come on, lets be serious.

They started asking us to bring down certain things first. We pretty much ignored them. We just kept making trips and continued to ignore them. By this time another guy had arrived making three people on our side walk annoying us.

And then it got real interesting. Two of the guys started arguing with each other about who was first and who got to look through the DVD’s first. Then they were up in each other’s faces. This continued for the next 45 minutes as we continued to get set up. At one point I told them if they didn’t chill out I was going to call the cops. To be stubborn we brought down the movies last.

They continued to argue even while they were going through the movies. And then one guy made his purchases and left. The other guy stayed another hour just “talking” to anyone who would listen about how the other guy had been rude to him. He would NOT shut up. Finally he left.

UGH.

We ended up making about 300 dollars. I was pretty much giving things away which was very different than the first time we did a yard sale. I drove a hard bargain then and wouldn’t budge on the prices. This time everything was pretty much a dollar or two.

The day started out warmish buy by 10:00 the wind had picked up and it had become cold. So we actually wrapped things up around 11:30 which was 90 minutes ahead of schedule. We still had a full truck load of things we took to Goodwill when we were done.

By 12:00 I was back home, in the shower and about to really start my birthday weekend.